Wednesday, May 20, 2015

The Big Book Award announced its list of nine finalists
yesterday. Nine feels a little like a miscount, though: some of this year’s titles
contain multiple volumes or are very, very long. Here they are:

Anna Matveeva:Девять девяностых (Nine from the Nineties). Short story collection. Some stories,
including (apparently) this one, were written for Snob. I thought some of Matveeva’s stories in an earlier collection
were very decent. Also on the 2015 NatsBest
shortlist.

Aleksei Varlamov: Мысленный волк (The Imagined Wolf, perhaps?). A novel set in the 1910s that
involves some real-life figures, including our old friend Grigory Rasputin.

Igor Virabov:Андрей Вознесенский (Andrei Voznesenskii). A biography of the
poet.

Dina Rubina:Русская канарейка ((The?) Russian Canary). Trilogy, a family saga set in the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries.

Valerii Zalotukha:
Свечка (The Candle). Novel. According to this piece from Novaya gazeta, in which Klarissa Pul’son
makes predictions about (with pretty decent accuracy and some key details) the Big Book
finalist list, this book covers just about everything, containing “полный русский набор”(“the full Russian complement” has a nice
ring to it), which probably explains why this two-volume set comes to 1696 pages. Gulp. I’m
very much looking forward to this book, though: comparisons to War and Peace always catch me.

Guzel’ Iakhina:Зулейха открывает глаза (Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes). A historical
novel that starts with a kulak woman being exiled: I’ve read the beginning of Zuleikha and look forward to reading
more.

All of which means I have a lot of reading to do before late November. Of course
I’m excited to be a member of Big Book’s Literary Academy—the award’s large (around
100 members) jury—and can’t wait to get my books!

Up Next: Read
Russia Award finalists, BookExpo America (and Read Russia Award) trip report, National Bestseller
Award. And two books: Eugene Vodolazkin’s Solovyov
and Larionov, which I’ll start translating this summer, and Sergei Nosov’s Член общества, или Голодное время
(something like Member of the Society or
A Time of Hunger), the sad-but-funny story of a man’s life after selling
all his Dostoevsky.

I've finally learned the source of Varlamov's title; it's from St. John Chrysostom’s prayer before Holy Communion “that I may not by much abstaining from Thy communion become the prey of the spiritual wolf” (see, e.g., here).

Thank you for posting this, Languagehat: I should have added a note about that reference long ago! I was very sorry to lose interest in the book about 150 pages in, largely because the writing felt so dense that nothing ever quite came alive for me. That despite the Silver Age setting and lots of other otherwise auspicious indicators, like the idea of that wolf.